Musky fishing tips from a Hall of Famer
Category: fishing tips
Mar 18th, 2019 by Keith Worrall 588
Modified Mar 18th, 2019 at 10:35 AM
It seems like a simple recipe, really.
Joe Bucher — longtime host of “Fishing with Joe Bucher” and a 2002 Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame inductee — believes there are just three ingredients to consistently catching big muskies. They are knowledge, skill and effort.
“It’s isn’t luck,” said the Wisconsin founder of Musky Hunter magazine. “You’ve got to have all three.”
The rub, of course, is they usually come only with time. Lots of it.
Bucher, though, recently shared some secrets for catching more muskies more often. All center around one thing: getting big fish to bite.
It’s one thing to find fish, he said. It’s another to turn their natural “wolf-like” curiosity into a commitment.
“The biggest difference between a real successful angler in the musky game a lot of times and everybody else is the ability to get the fish to strike,” Bucher said.
Here are 10 ways to do it.
1. Throw big blades
Muskies are apex predators, at the top of the food chain. To the biggest — fish maybe 20 years old — everything is a potential lunch.
They’re infamous for following lures, though, sometimes right up to the boat, then disappearing.
If Bucher gets a “follow” like that on a topwater lure, he immediately casts back over that fish. But this time he tosses a big inline spinner, one perhaps with #10 blades. He reels it back as fast as he can, creating a commotion on the surface.
“You just create this incredible tension and excitement that makes the fish bite,” Bucher said. “It does work more often than not.”
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